It’s hard to be Last.fm. Locked into an uncomfortable partnership with an industry that has proven itself downright hostile to any inkling of serving up music for free over the Internet, the business is a hodge-podge of bad compromises that more often than not services the music industry over Last.fm’s users.{ad}

The problem is the current licensing agreement Last.fm has with the labels. They roundly prohibit mobile streaming. That doesn’t take into account Last.fm’s own official apps (available on the iPhone and Google Android), but it puts a lot of other unofficial clients in the docks.

This affects a lot of people. The vast majority of mobile Last.fm users are on Windows Mobile or Blackberry phones. This means that the excellent Windows Mobile app, Pocket Scrobbler, has been killed off, as has the Blackberry’s paid app, Flipside.

The good news is that the announcement is accompanied by a change in the developer API that should make things much easier for non-mobile developers. And naivete provides a plus side: though Windows Mobile, Symbian, and Blackberry users are thoroughly reamed by Last.fm’s latest licensing deal with the record labels, the resulting outcry will hopefully encourage Last.fm to release official clients on all of these platforms.